In a drama of the highest order there is little food for censure or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect.
Music, when soft voices die, vibrates in the memory.
Thou demandest what is love? It is that powerful attraction towards all that we conceive, or fear, or hope beyond ourselves, when we find within our own thoughts the chasm of an insufficient void, and seek to awaken in all things that are, a community with what we experience within ourselves.
Obscenity, which is ever blasphemy against the divine beauty in life, is a monster for which the corruption of society forever brings forth new food, which it devours in secret.
Fear not for the future, weep not for the past.
Hence the vanity of translation; it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower—and this is.
Kiss me, so long but as a kiss may last!
Science, Poetry, and Thought Are thy lamps; they make the lot Of the dwellers in a cot So serene, they curse it not.
Hell is a city much like London.
Government is an evil; it is only the thoughtlessness and vices of men that make it a necessary evil. When all men are good and wise, government will of itself decay.
I bind the Sun's throne with a burning zone, And the Moon's with a girdle of pearl; The volcanoes are dim, and the stars reel and swim, When the whirlwinds my banner unfurl.
O Spirit! fearlessly bear on. Though storms may break the primrose on its stalk, Though frosts may blight the freshness of its bloom, Yet spring's awakening breath will woo the earth To feed with kindliest dews its favorite flower, That blooms in mossy bank and darksome glens, Lighting the greenwood with its sunny smile.
War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight, the lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade.
Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep - He hath awakened from the dream of life.
Joy, once lost, is pain.
Forget the dead, the past? O yet there are ghosts that may take revenge for it, memories that make the heart a tomb, regrets which gild thro' the spirit's gloom, and with ghastly whispers tell that joy, once lost, is pain.
The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.
The great secret of morals is Love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own.
God is represented as infinite, eternal, incomprehensible; he is contained under every predicate in non that the logic of ignorance could fabricate.
Are we not formed, as notes of music are, for one another, though dissimilar?
Poets, the best of them, are a very chameleonic race; they take the colour not only of what they feed on, but of the very leaves under which they pass.
Death is the veil which those who live call life; They sleep, and it is lifted.
Venice, it's temples and palaces did seem like fabrics of enchantment piled to heaven.
IF [GOD] HAS SPOKEN, WHY IS THE UNIVERSE NOT CONVINCED?
We look before and after, And pine for what is not; Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught; Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.
I think that the leaf of a tree, the meanest insect on which we trample, are in themselves arguments more conclusive than any which can be adduced that some vast intellect animates Infinity.
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.
To hope until hope creates from its very own wreck the thing it contemplates.
I am the eye with which the Universe / Beholds itself, and knows it is divine.
The cloud of mind is discharging its collected lightning.
I have drunken deep of joy, And I will taste no other wine tonight.
No change, no pause, no hope! Yet I endure.
Rise like Lions after slumber In unvanquishable number - Shake your chains to earth like dew Which in sleep had fallen on you - Ye are many - they are few.
A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.
Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.
All spirits are enslaved which serve things evil.
For love and beauty and delight, there is no death nor change.
Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.
The more we study, the more we discover our ignorance.
True Love in this differs from gold and clay,/That to divide is not to take away.
She dwelt among the untrodden ways Beside the springs of Dove, A maid whom there were none to praise And very few to love.
Familiar acts are beautiful through love.
The distinction between poets and prose writers is a vulgar error.
Yes! all is past — swift time has fled away, Yet its swell pauses on my sickening mind; How long will horror nerve this frame of clay? I'm dead, and lingers yet my soul behind.
At the very time that philosophers of the most enterprising benevolence were founding in Greece those institutions which have rendered it the wonder and luminary of the world, am I required to believe that the weak and wicked king of an obscure and barbarous nation, a murderer, a traitor and a tyrant, was the man after God's own heart?
In fact, the truth cannot be communicated until it is perceived.
